from the shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit dept

Pick Another Senator: How The Open Internet Helped Scott Colom Win Mississippi

By now you’ve seen that after over a week of waiting to make sure that every vote was counted, Democrat Scott Colom has defeated incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith to become the new Senator from Mississippi — the first Black senator the state’s voters have ever chosen (during Reconstruction, Mississippi had two Black senators, Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, but that was before the Seventeenth Amendment, when state legislatures still picked senators). There is, of course, some satisfaction in seeing Colom, specifically, defeat Hyde-Smith, given that she directly blocked his opportunity to be appointed to the federal bench three years ago.

Colom won for a bunch of reasons (strong candidate, great ground game, putting in the hard work of meeting voters across the state) but one that shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle — especially at a moment when hating the internet is popular — is his smart use of the open internet to get his message out there and to draw attention to the race both within Mississippi and across the wider nation.

Lots of people are now trying to do postmortems to explain how Colom won, especially since the Democratic establishment totally wrote him off. Matt Yglesias — who, for unknown reasons, is still listened to by Democratic leadership — openly scoffed at the idea of the Democratic Party spending money on Colom just a few months ago.

And Colom (rightly) called out the overreliance on election forecasters like the Cook Political Report that resulted in the Democratic Party mostly ignoring his campaign.

There were plenty of factors behind the win, even though the national party mostly ignored him until the final month. Obviously, the national environment that turned the expected “blue wave” into a “blue tsunami” helped at the margins. But Colom and his team had an incredible ground game, and he spent months personally meeting with Mississippi voters, especially in communities that are often ignored:

“We didn’t have hundreds of million dollars to come in to spend – we did it going door to door, festival to festival, earning support,” Colom said at a canvassing event on the Mississippi coast. “We’re gonna shock a lot of people, but I’m not gonna be shocked. The people of Mississippi are behind this campaign: they understand Mississippi matters.”

But some of the credit also has to go to how well he used the open internet to route around the money gap. While he didn’t have all that money for TV ads, he and his team created some incredibly memorable ads that went viral on social media, with perhaps none more powerful than his response to Hyde-Smith suggesting — in a very “let them eat cake” manner — that voters frustrated by beef prices just “pick another protein”: “Pick another protein? Shiiiiiit. I’d rather pick another senator instead.”

That ad (and a few other clever and catchy ones his team made) spread on its own, which meant he didn’t have to spend money he didn’t have putting it on TV. It’s been credited with helping put his campaign on the national map in its final weeks. Indeed, the virality of the ad actually helped open up more traditional funding from the Democratic Party that had avoided the race before. Colom himself has called the ad “game changing” while noting they were able to create it and get it out there “with SO little” support.

In an interview with Politico, the guy who created the ad, who Colom shouted out in that tweet, Ryan Sayles, admits that he’s never worked in a campaign and just focused on what he thought would resonate with people in Mississippi. The fact that they could just put it on the internet (and didn’t have to run it through political machinery) was part of the benefit:

I think the dope part is, we didn’t run that ad by anybody. … We didn’t go around getting OK’s from anybody … we just put it out. But also … I’ve never worked on a campaign, and I think that I didn’t have a sense of what Dems normally did. You know what I mean?

We just did what we liked, and that was one of the big things Scott always talked about. “Man, if we are good with the content, we are good.”

That matters right now, when so much of the political class seems to hate the open internet and keeps demanding that we “regulate” it into something locked down. When the party establishment decided Mississippi wasn’t worth the money, the open internet was what let Colom go around all of them, take his case straight to the voters — and then drag the national party into realizing he had a chance. I have no idea how Colom views internet regulations — though Mississippi’s state legislature has passed some horrific anti-internet laws. But when he’s inevitably asked to vote on bills to lock down the internet, I hope he remembers what the open internet did for him.